Skip to main content

Six Keys Phrases for Testing Your Conlang: Ubese!

I wanted to test out the 6 Key Phrases on the Ubese (Star Wars) conlang I have played with in the past.

Oh by the way, in a previous post I remarked that it seemed silly to not have the B sound in a language called "Ubese," but these kind of things happen all the time in the real world. Germany vs. Deutschland vs. Allemagne - all names for the same country! Ubese could have been said to some explorers as "Uhheesh" but those explorers, due to their own phonology, could only say it as "Oobeez(and spell it as Ubese)." Maybe Ubes means "quiet" or "few words" in their language, and this attribute becomes the name of the people? Or the person that discovered them might have been called Ub? There are definitely some ways you can have some fun with this, as you pick names in your con.

In order to speak this correctly, keep your jaw closed but part your lips. Do not move your lips!
Phonology: t, sh, ch, k, n, l, hh (a harsh H sound made back in the throat), y (semi-vowel), ee, ay, aw, i, o, a, u
Morphology: CICV(T) (Consonant, Inflected-vowel, Consonant, Vowel, Optional-Tense-vowel)
Inflections: I=ee, you=a, it=aw, he=o, she=e, we=ay, they=u,
Grammar/Syntax: SOV
Vocabulary (inflected vowel shown as aw for neutrality): red=kaunee, John=Chawnaw, give=kawshee, want=yawkay

Other points to remember: this is an extremely simple and context-sensitive language! The inflections are vague but they kind of have to be with such a simple structure. The order of the words makes a big difference.

The apple is red.
It (pointing at or holding the apple) red is-being.
Kawnee

It is John's apple.
It (pointing at or holding the apple) John's is-being.
Chawnaw

I give John the apple.
I-am-giving it (the apple) to-John .
Keeshee Chawnaw 

We want to give him the apple.
We-are-wanting it (the apple) to-him-give.
Yaykay koshee

He gives it to John.
He is-giving it-to-John.
Koshee Chonaw

She gives it to him.
She-to-him- it-is-giving
She koshee (remember, the "she" is pronounced "sheh")

 I like this! These phrases feel right and sound pretty close to the stuff Boushh says. It feels way too simple and vague to really work as the language of a star-faring people, but if feels right at least.

And no, I couldn't resist putting in the Hello Kitty Boushh pic up there.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Unknown said…
Like the way you've fleshed out this thing. But where are you getting the vocab. I didn't see any word for giving in ubese before.
February 18, 2018 at 8:44 AM
Anonymous said…
Awesome!
May 29, 2020 at 12:03 AM
Dana R said…
I find it interesting how you incorporated real world examples into your explanation.
March 13, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tolkien's Alphabets

I was working on my fonts for my conlang again and I starting thinking about alphabets in general, and I thought it would be fun to do a post on Tolkien's Middle Earth alphabets, Cirth and Tengwar. First, let's take a look at Cirth , which was used to write Khuzdul, the dwarvish language, as well as Quenya and Sindarin, the elvish languages. It was based on the Norse & Anglo-Saxon Futhark runes. There's nothing very fancy about this alphabet, it functions much the same as our own; each glyph represent one character. But note that the different letters correspond to each other in certain ways: letters that are phonetically close to each other look similar. P and B, for example. B is pretty much the "voiced" form of P (voiced means that your vocal chords are engaged and vibrating). B looks just like P but its got that extra little stroke sticking out there, making it look like an R. Same thing for T and D, and K and G. And those are just the plosives; lo...
3 comments
Read more

Orthography - Making Your Own Alphabet

This is Part One, Part Two , Part Three The idea of making up my own alphabet was probably the first thing that attracted me to conlanging. After I learned Bulgarian, I made up a code that was based on Cirth and Bulgarian . I sent my brother the code and would mail him letters using it, just for fun. I started thinking about developing a new alphabet later, when I was playing the Myst games, and I saw the flowing script of D'Ni  (D'Ni is a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books). First things to consider as you start developing your alphabet - What do you want? a phonetic alphabet a non-phonetic alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (meaning one character per syllable, like po, kee, ot, or kel, would be represented by one character/Tibetan is syllabic) or an abjad, which would be a consonant-only-alphabet, and all vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew and Arabic are examples) A little research on Omniglot will...
20 comments
Read more

Numbers in your Conlang

This topic comes up every once in awhile on the conlang forums - numbers in your conlang. This post goes out to you, Janko Gorenc. ;) Usually the biggest issue of these threads is simply, what base do you want for your number system and why? The base for your number system basically means, how many numbers are there, before you go up to the next "place" in the numeral system? Now, most of the world uses a base 10 number system, and its probably because people have 10 fingers. But we could have had a base 5 number system, and a lot of conlangers play with this. Or, you might be developing a language and culture for an alien culture that has 12 fingers, or six limbs, or nine tentacles! Whatever base you want, for whatever reason, I wanted to provide a brief tutorial on how to calculate or translate base 10 numbers into another base, or vice versa. If you want to know more about number systems before diving into this, read these Wikipedia articles on number systems....
4 comments
Read more